Can't set icon view >128 in Automator

It looks like a limitation of that version of the action (v1.0), which dates back to Leopard. The Lion version (v1.1) goes up to 512.

I looked at the action version in Leopard. The bigger icon sizes were started in Snow Leopard, which as the same version, so it looks like the action didn't get updated until Lion.

It seems a trivial fix is needed to make the action work as desired under Snow Leopard.

First, close Automator and make a back-up copy of the action (just in case you need it again). You'll find the action at

/System/Library/Automator/Set Folder Views.action

Then navigate to

/System/Library/Automator/Set Folder Views.action/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/main.nib/keyedobjects.nib

Open keyedobjects.nib in a text editor. (TextWrangler works well.)

Locate these lines:

<key>NSMaxValue</key>

<real>128</real>

Change 128 to 512. Save.

A five-minute test suggests that this file modification does the job.

mns579, that was a great solution to the Snow Leopard 128x128 icon size limit problem - thanks!

I had been wanting to be able to use Automator's Set Folder Views to go all the way up to 512x512 for a long time, and was quite frustrated you couldn't do it.

I understand by the earlier post that they finally fixed this in Lion, but I'm not anywhere near ready to go to Lion (or Mountain Lion) for the reason that I still have a few important Power PC apps I need to run. (Grrrrr!!!)

After trying your solution and seeing that it worked, I was still a little perplexed that you couldn't set some specific values like 256x256 using the slider. But after messing around with TextWrangler a bit more, and following a procedure similar to yours I did this:

Locate these lines (just slightly below the ones you mentioned):

<key>NSNumberOfTickMarks</key>

<integer>15</integer>

Change 15 to 32. Save.

This provides much more flexibility with the slider. I chose 32 because it's a good 'even' number, and gives you increments of 16. After that it was easy to select 256 and many other values.

Just thought I'd share that 🙂

Thanks for the tip. Having a related problem. I'm running Mac OS 10.8.4 and I cannot access 'keyedobjects.nib' because main.nib is a folder not a file. Any idea how to make this modification above on 10.8.4?

I'm still running 10.6, so I can't say what might have changed under 10.8. In 10.6, main.nib is a "package"; control-click on it, then Show Package Contents to see what's inside and get to keyedobjects.nib. Of course, 10.8 may have changed matters.

I'm running 10.9. Showing package contents of main.nib is not possible, but I was able to open main.nib itself in Textwrangler and found both NSNumberOfTickMarks and NSMaxValue in it. Changing the values worked fine.